Casey Seiler: Armed, unlocked, perilous

Being stupid and careless isn't illegal; rank ignorance has, unfortunately, been part of the majestic fabric of American history since Columbus. It is, however, illegal to be so stupid and careless that your behavior poses a risk of serious injury to others — especially children.

Last week, both houses of the state Legislature took a stand against that level of dangerous behavior by passing a bill that requires anyone who owns a rifle, shotgun or firearm and has a child younger than 16 in their household to safely secure their weapon whenever it is "out of his or her immediate possession or control," either by placing it in a locked box or using a trigger lock or similar device. A failure to abide by that requirement would be a Class A misdemeanor.

Because this legislation, sponsored by Sen. Liz Krueger and Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, involved the Second Amendment, the floor debates featured some of the most surpassing intellectual dishonesty you're likely to see this year — if you're the sort of weirdo who trolls YouTube for state legislative floor debates, that is.

Sen. Jim Tedisco asked Krueger if we really needed to worry about implementing the law on households in which children were so small that they were unlikely to be able to crawl or toddle to where a loaded gun was located. Krueger responded that the bill language "didn't get into the nitty-gritty of at what age you start to be able to climb out of the crib or pull yourself up on furniture." She then pointed to the case of an 18-month-old in Tennessee who in May 2017 shot himself in the face with a pistol that had been left lying on a bed. The boy's father was charged with aggravated child neglect.

Many of the GOP lawmakers who objected to the bill noted that they had gun safes in their homes; none said it was a good idea to have guns stored around your house where children could get access to them — because, of course, it's a lunatic opinion. ("Don't get me wrong, safe storage of firearms is an essential moral component of gun ownership," wrote conservative Rochester radio host Bob Lonsberry in an otherwise bananas column that criticized the bill and waxed nostalgic for all the loaded weapons his relatives kept around their homes when he was a lad.) Instead, they expressed their conviction that such stupidity should be perfectly legal.

Echoing several of his colleagues, Sen. George Amedore (generally viewed as the smartest member of the Senate GOP conference to currently represent Rotterdam) released a statement after the vote that claimed the bill's provisions violated the U.S. Supreme Court's 2008 Heller decision, which determined that storage laws were unconstitutional unless they allowed a gun owner to unlock the firearm to defend their home. But New York's measure — like the safe storage laws of a dozen states and a far larger number of municipalities including Albany, Rochester, Buffalo and New York City — doesn't bar anyone from keeping an unlocked gun in your immediate possession or control, or unlocking it in order to shoot the bad people coming through the door, window or skylight. You can keep it in your nightstand, or under your pillow, or (my personal preference) under the covers gripped in each hand against whatever's making that noise in the closet.

This is why the Supreme Court has repeatedly passed on declaring safe storage requirements unconstitutional despite a host of lower court rulings upholding those laws. Sure, an increasingly conservative high court might someday take up the issue and knock them down, but Amedore was indulging in Supreme Court fan fiction, not citing precedent.

On the Assembly side, lawmakers conjured the sort of cinematic hypotheticals in which rural folk are set upon by ruthless marauders but are unable to unlock their weapons in time. I call this rhetorical tactic "strawdogging," an allusion to faulty "straw man" arguments as well as the 1971 Sam Peckinpah film "Straw Dogs," in which Dustin Hoffman's mousy math professor defends his cottage from a brace of depraved Cornishmen.

Brian Manktelow, whose district lies west of Syracuse, asked Paulin what would happen in the event that he and his wife went out to dinner, leaving their teenagers home to face an intruder without the ability to access the family's firearms. This was more like a dark "Home Alone" than "Straw Dogs," but still.

"You would have wanted your 15-year-old to have fought off the intruder?" Paulin asked, with the air of someone suddenly confronted by serious doubts about this whole representative-form-of-government thing.

While I would have used this opportunity to scold Manktelow for failing to train his children in the lethal use of edged weapons and the Israeli martial art known as Krav Maga, Paulin took the high road. She pointed out that while, yes, there might be nonfictional scenarios in which children at home with locked guns might be placed in peril, science shows that kids with access to guns in the home face a far greater risk of firearm-assisted suicide and accidental death.

This bill is named for Nicholas Naumkin, who was shot in the head by a friend at the friend's home in Wilton just before Christmas 2010. Naumkin, 12, died the next day.

The friend's father, who had left his 9mm pistol in an unlocked drawer, pleaded guilty to child endangerment. It's another Class A misdemeanor.

Casey Seiler is the Times Union's editor. He previously served as managing editor, Capitol Bureau chief and entertainment editor. He is a longtime contributor to WMHT's weekly political roundup "New York Now."

Before arriving in Albany in 2000, Seiler worked at the Burlington Free Press in Vermont and the Jackson Hole Guide in Wyoming.

A graduate of Northwestern University, Seiler is a Buffalo native who grew up in Louisville, Ky. He lives in Albany's lovely Pine Hills.